Chapter 1: False Hope

My story continues from 09/2009, I mentioned that I lived with 5 others in a shared house of students, graduated or dropped out, myself being the latter. An interesting bunch of misfits to say the least, 3 of my closest friends include Steve, Arijus and Mark.

Mark was a pharmacy masters final year student with a tendency to body building, naked parading, vegetarian cooking, internet trolling and self-medicating. Otherwise a nice guy oh... and he was serious about Rome: Total War! (Good game)

Arijus was taking a placement year out of a business degree to open a women's lingerie store in the Brighton lanes, not his best move! This guy would try to fix anything and everything himself including his Audi A4 imported from Lithuania, with nothing more than his laptop and some basic tools from a bargain tool box.

Steve is a law degree graduate and ReditUK Starcraft II tournament admin, caster and Master league Protoss player. MAD skills! As well as that he has a passion for Steam bargains, one I seem to have caught.

With the bill paid, and the help of my house mates I got straight (lol, too lazy to do anything immediately... a week or two) to buying my rig! Steve built his own rig, well he brought the parts but it arrived early and Arijus got excited and built it all before Steve woke up.

We scoured the internet, three geeks on a missions to max the credit card, together like the three musketeers with mice as our swords!... I didn't have a clue, and the others felt a little uncomfortable suggesting things, as I was very ignorant as to what I was looking at! So they tried to explain what was what. I ended up going to aria.co.uk and picked a few pretty things (not that I'm impulsive and I definitely never brought bagpipes or a snake on a whim) and stick of ram for the dust box (PC) I was using, whilst I was looking for the type of ram to get I discovered that the girl/woman I was seeing (now fiancée... :D) was a builder, as few of the components matched the case make and model!, I was a little nervous about spending everything at once, having previously declared that I would never get a credit card... oops! So I brought a few basics...

10/10/09

1 x G.SKILL DDR 400 PC3200 1GB (1GBx1) @ 24.09GBP (not worth linking)
1 x X-Blade MIDI Tower Case - Silver @ 27.54GBP (including 450W PSU)
1 x Asus M4A785TD-M EVO, AMD 785G Chipset, DDR3, AM3, mATX @ 70.28GBP
1 x AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0GHz, [AM3, Retail] @ 137.94GBP

Buying so few items turned out to be the most frustrating decision I have made in a long time! Although the extra ram helped subdue the need for a new computer. Having the case, mobo and pcu built uselessly in the corner of my room was eating at me....

...£235.76 build total so far...

The Beginning!

1993/94 Auction house brought cassette eating Amstrad CPC 464, must have been 5 or 6 and thought it was the bees knees, 2 tonal display topped of with the best of sounds much like a Nokia 3310... beep... beep beep beep. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, AMAZING!

1995  Windows 3.1. I would cycle 10 miles each way to a friends house (Bayliss) to play a game called 'Rover', not that I can find proof of it anywhere. The term 'Doing a Bayliss' was created by my mum, simply meaning not sharing, and used in nearly every situation. Having a sister 4 years younger, sharing doesn't come into the equation, everything being hers or mine, mine being the computer.

1996-2001 Windows 95 later upgraded to Windows 98 SE. I moved to the same school as Bayliss and Dad brought a Packard Bell for £2500, crazy! 2.4Mhz processor and a 4Gb HHD!!!! A beast of the time! I faked sickness for a week just so I could play Big Red Racers, the demo for MDK (scary at 7 BTW), random other demo's and software that came with the computer.

2002-2008 Windows XP. We got a dell nothing too special, 17" LCD monitor (forced dad into buying it! :). I moved my bed into the computer room so I could maximise play time! Half-Life and Counter strike were all the rage and when dad got IDSN (Go dad!! 128Kbit/s, WOW) the computer got REAL... ridden with viruses Kazaa and Lime-wire were used non-stop! My social Life boomed with the introduction of MSN and it caught on like wild-fire in our year group. A friend getting into hacking and brought me to beta testing his new Trojans, great fun and a great story to come, to be told another day. That ended with me opening the wrong file and releasing my port and IP to the world, from that came my first format and reinstall. Then there was Bebo... Myspace... Facebook... lack of actual face-to-face conversation! Scanners never saw more action until people started using digital cameras.

2008-2009 Windows XP... still, Yawn. A 4 year old Asus laptop. I moved to Brighton to do a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and mum gave me her laptop to my studies on. Sure... more like to check Facebook and play games, not that any games of the time would run on it (PS2 did fine), so I resorted to retro... emulated snes games! 

2009-2010 Windows XP...STILL!!! Tragedy... mums laptop (never took ownership of it!) died! :( I was left without internet access, without Facebook, without uni work... oh wait... nope dropped out (too many games). The girl I was 'seeing' at the time (now fiancée) gave me her old computer to use as she had got a new laptop and had no use for it, very nice.

September 2010 Windows 7 64bit... got rid of XP and skipped vista, YAY! Well not quite but that's another post. I lived with 3 students, 2 unemployed people and me with a full time bar job in a hotel, not the best money anyway, our final red letter warning bill from southern water had come in at £800. No-one had the money! So I got a £1500 credit card (a decision that I almost regret), I did the sensible thing... £800 for bills an the remaining £700 on take away pizzas and computer components!! This terrible water bill was the start of something beautiful...